


All Who Live to See Such Times

by IronAndRags



Category: Aladdin (1992), Twisted: The Untold Story of a Royal Vizier - Holmes/McMahon/Lang & Lang & Gale
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-04-02
Updated: 2020-05-03
Packaged: 2021-03-01 03:00:03
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,351
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23438086
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/IronAndRags/pseuds/IronAndRags
Summary: The divine Sultana Yasmin al-Agrabah was never fated, it seems, to rule over an eternal golden age. Magic slumbers once more, and the world is barrelling towards a catastrophe that her father's generation could never have dreamed of.
Comments: 1
Kudos: 5





	1. Chapter 1

When Johann was brought in train to the golden city of Agrabah, he could hardly believe his eyes. As the whirling desert sands cleared, he beheld the great dome of the palace, and the sparkling marble of Aladdin's gates - he knew he had arrived at the center of the world that is. He felt a surge of wonder, and then, like a cold spike through his heart, the chilling realization that this would be his home forever. His village had been burned to the ground. Father had been cut to pieces fleeing from the slave caravan, and mother had simply disappeared - whether dead or captured, he did not know - in the smoke and confusion of the raid.

Johann himself had been clapped in manacles. He hadn't tried to run like father, because he knew what would happen to him if he did. The dark, smelly caravan had bumped along in virtual silence, reeking of blood and filth, until they came to Krasnacht-veille - the closest market town. There the soldiers driving the caravan had rested in an inn, and some white bread and cold water had been tossed into the back of the cart. Johann and the other prisoners had eaten hungrily. He hardly slept that night. And then, in the morning, the train set out again. Johann had devoured the old books of geography that could be bought in Krasnacht-veille, when he had gone there with his parents on market days. So he knew that they were headed east - east into the rising sun, and out of the Christian world. East to Agrabah, the gateway to the desert.

The muffled voices of the soldiers as they reached the city gates had confirmed his fears - he, and all the other prisoners packed into this stinking cart, were to be slaves in the court of the Sultana of Agrabah. As they rumbled into the great city, he blinked and marveled. He wanted to cry - but whether from fear, or wonder, or simply nausea and exhaustion, he had no idea. The other prisoners were asleep, mostly, or scratching pointlessly at their iron chains.

This is not the moment for escape, Johann thought to himself. Give them a reason to unchain you. Then you can make yourself free.

\---

The Sultana of Agrabah was draped across her golden throne, rising and lying down again as if she was dancing with an evil spirit, or arguing with a ghost. Her Grand Vizier looked on, his expression carefully controlled. He displayed no hint of worry, or amusement. He was simply here to serve.

"You requested the presence of your Grand Vizier, my liege?"

The Sultana raised a single ringed finger and rose, finally, from her throne. Arrayed in silken robes, even if those robes were rumpled and the peacock feather on her headdress slightly askew, Jasmine of Agrabah was an imposing figure. The plain black cap and simple robe of a modern Grand Vizier made his contrast to her majesty all the more clear.

"Has your department of sorcery made any progress, on the Cave of Wonders or anything else?"

Baful, the Grand Vizier, lifted an eyebrow. "My liege, I'm sorry to say that the work of wise men is still slow. I will tell you on the very instant that we find a reputable sign or signal of the location of any djinn or genie, or enchanted lamp or amulet or carpet of any sort."

"What about disreputable signs?" she asked.

He bowed his head. "We are doing our very best, your majesty."

She sighed, and collapsed back on her throne. A jewel-encrusted gold anklet clinked against the chair.

"Baful, why is so much given to the young? They bear the weight of the world on their shoulders. An opportunity is handed to a silly child, and the continents themselves shake loose their moorings to make way for what she decrees. And then it is left to the old and wise to try to sort it all out, to make the whole world function again after it has re-formed itself to the whims of the foolish and the young. It is a nonsense. It's disgraceful!"

The Sultana was in high dudgeon now. Baful waited for a moment or two, to make sure that she had finished her speech.

"My liege, your situation was... unique. The fate of continents was not really in the hands of the young and foolish at that moment, I would say. It was in the hands of scheming old men, and a young girl was one of the tools in their battle to reshape the kingdom. What she chose was just what it was, and if those old men had thought she might choose differently, they would have accomplished their ends by different means."

The Sultana frowned. "You may have been there, Baful, for the war, but not for the decisive moment. It was in my hands. My f- My father's Grand Vizier, Ja'far had placed his trust in me. I could have chosen anything."

"Your empire is at peace, my lady," said Baful.

"It may be so. But some days I think that I was wickeder than my father was. We live on Earth, after all, and not in heaven."

"We live on Earth for now, your majesty," the Grand Vizier said quietly.

The Sultana's expression was inscrutable. Then she waved her braceleted hand, as if swatting away a fly. "Very well. That's enough of my self-indulgence for one day. What news of the Two Kingdoms, Baful?"

He glanced down at the roll of parchment in his hand. "Your empire is in good array, my lady. One of our spies in the court of Emperor Xi Po has stopped sending missives, but there has been bird sickness in the region so he may have lost access to his swallows - or he may be in a difficult situation of the sort which can resolve itself. Jamal is keeping an eye on the matter, but I don't think Xi Po has any wish to cross us at the moment. If our spy is truly hurt, then we can regard the matter as more serious, since it may suggest that Xi Po is expecting an attack on Agrabah from the Western front. But no definite rumors of such things have reached our ears, so for now we will regard it as a matter of bird sickness and nothing more."

The Sultana didn't like to issue definitive orders on these sorts of things, as she wisely trusted her Grand Vizier's trained corps of diplomats, but she liked to be kept abreast of what was happening. He had long ago learned not to hide from her even the vaguest of suspicions. She would not act rashly on them, he had discovered - and she could always tell if he was keeping something from her.

She nodded gravely. "Bird sickness. Very well. I trust that you will keep your ears to the Landbarnes' windows, as well as to Xi Po's."

He nodded and continued, running his finger down the parchment. "Let's see, what else is there... aha. A new shipment of slaves from the Western provinces has arrived, my lady, so if you wish to pick out a replacement for old Cooky - bless his heart, et cetera - you can inspect the cream of the crop here at the palace. We could delegate, of course, but I know you like to pick your servants. And that inspection can be held whenever you desire; the prisoners' caravan should be coming through the gates of Al- through the city gates right now."

The Sultana laughed. "You can call things by their common names in my presence, Baful," she said.

"Yes, your majesty," he said, betraying no emotion.

"I am not sensitive in this matter. The legends are good for the moral health of our subjects."

"Yes, your majesty."

"Someday I will be an old, old woman and I will write a true history of my father and all of those things. But that day is not for a long time yet."

"Yes, your majesty."

The Sultana sighed, as if realizing the futility of this conversation, which they repeated so often that it was practically a game. Baful was shrewd enough to intuit her true preferences, and he simply waited.

"If that is all, then you may go," she said, at last, with a flick of her wrist.

"Your majesty, the slaves-?"

"I have lunch with Achmed this afternoon, but after that, yes, you may have your men bring a few of the good ones in here, and I'll pick someone." She heaved an even greater sigh, and her expression grew abstracted. "I suppose that all of this is my punishment, for failing to eradicate evil when I had the chance."

"Yes, your majesty."

She let him go, and Baful slipped out of the throne room and back into his own offices.

\---

When the caravan stopped at a marketplace in the middle of the city, Johann felt his manacles unlocked, and a burly guard took hold of him and dragged him out of the cart. Only a couple of other men were being unchained.

"What's happening?" he asked, in his best approximation of the local language.

The guards just looked at him unhappily. Along with a couple of the younger and leaner men, Johann was marched down a side street, away from the noise of the bazaar, and then onto a well-paved causeway. There were guards on every side, now, so it would be suicide to make a break for it. So instead, he took to studying the buildings they were passing. It was then that he realized, with a start, that they were headed straight for the royal palace.


	2. Chapter 2

Prince Achmed III of Bikhar was the bearer of more bad news at their fortnightly lunch that afternoon. Lifting his teacup with the delicacy of a refined palace courtier - one who had never known combat, one who had not even been alive when Bikhar and Agrabah had last been at war - he tossed off a casual remark: "You know, you're lucky that you're still getting slaves from the West right now. The armies of Landebarne just liberated two more villages from our possession this past week."

Jasmine nearly spit out her tea. "Are you joking? Why haven't I heard about this?" she demanded.

Achmed seemed to shrink back, as if he wasn't sure what was going on. "I was, eh, I was advised, you know, that it would perhaps be for the best if these matters were not trumpeted as if they were of great significance - you know, that there was really no reason to bother you all in Agrabah as long as it was just an issue in Bikhar, you know."

The Sultana set her tea down with a clink, and closed her eyes. Achmed II, who had faced her predecessor in the War of Seven Roses which ended in their present political union - paid for by a cache of treasure which was unearthed because of a wish would could have been phrased much more broadly - had been a strong prince, and a cunning general. His son, Achmed III of Bikhar, was neither. Someone in the court of Bikhar had told him to keep the news of these skirmishes from reaching Agrabah. She was still staring at the inside of her eyelids, which were pulsing red.

She opened them, and did her best to smile coyly. "Achmed, it sounds like you said more than you intended to," she said, and he blushed. There was a time, when Achmed was a young man, that he had been in love with her, just like his father had been; but now they were both older and he was simply embarrassed the way a schoolboy is, when he's called upon to answer a question that he hasn't studied enough to know.

Agrabah-Bikhar (as it was wise to call the Empire of the Two Kingdoms, when in the presence of the nominal prince of Bikhar) was well-positioned to profit from trade between east and west, but the flip side of that dangerous coin was that it could be vulnerable to a pincer-like attack - their isthmus was not as wide as the continents on either side, and the sea was wide enough that they couldn't count on support from Phanet-Ur in time in the case of a sudden attack. This deception, from the court of Bikhar, could prove deadly to both kingdoms, if it was intended to hide the possibility of a serious threat. What was the motive?

Achmed was waving at her. No, not at her, she realized. She turned around, and there was Maharajah, her tiger, licking his paw and looking lovingly between the two of them.

The Sultana smiled at Achmed. "You can feed him, if you want," she said. The Prince laughed and picked up a little fried fish from their table.

This man should be writing sonnets, she thought, and racing horses through the desert. She didn't want to ask him directly about his advisors, so there was really nothing else that should could get from him at this meeting. Sitting down for tea with a... free spirit like Achmed twice a month was a fair price to pay for calm relations between the two kingdoms; but they rarely managed to accomplish much more than that. In that respect, at least, today was already an exception.

After wasting a few more hours watching Achmed flop around contentedly, like a dead conversational fish, Jasmine sent him on his way and asked for the pick of the recent slaves to be brought in to the palace.

Baful had already had them brought to the dungeon, as it turned out. Which was very thoughtful.

\---

Johann was only in the palace dungeon for a few hours, that day, but he was there long enough to know that it was the sickest and most miserable place that he had ever been. The stone walls dripped with putrid moisture. There were old men dangling from the walls and begging him for scraps of bread. He wished that he had some to offer. It was suffocating, and when the guards led them up into the fresh palace air he gasped in relief. Bending over to gasp earned him a whack on the spine. One of the soldiers murmured something that he didn't quite understand. Something about the Sultana. And they were led out into a shimmering garden, where the Sultana stood, beautiful and terrible in her robe of pure white silk, striking against her black-and-gray hair and her shimmering emerald eyes. She leaned upon a golden staff, the head of which was formed into a lunging cobra, with ruby eyes set in that flashed and sparkled in the dusky light.

She ran her polished nails along the chests of larger, stronger men, inspecting them with a cold and dispassionate eye, but when she came to Johann she stopped.

"A eunuch?" she asked, addressing one of her guards.

The palace guard shook his head. "Just a runt," he said.

Johann looked up at the Sultana, his heart racing, his vision still a little gauzy with dust and filth. Her eyes were boring into him - not compassionate, not kind, but not entirely dispassionate either. Yasmin al-Agrabah, Sultana of the Two Kingdoms - a divine enigma. From just beside her, though, the gaze of the golden cobra burned like a hot coal. This was a dangerous game.

She turned to her captain of the guard. "He will do. I don't want to give the scullery maids more worries," she said, with a laugh.

Johann wondered if he should take that as an insult or a compliment. But if she really meant him, then his symbolic manhood was the least of his concerns. Palace servants were well-treated, but in constant danger; this everyone knew. And everybody knew that Agrabah would fall to Christendom - to the Landebarnes - before this century was through. He suddenly imagined himself, not as a shining Christian soldier, but as one of the dark-faced Mohammedan defenders of a golden city put to siege. The white horses galloping towards the gates of this unchristian Babylon wouldn't be coming to save him, if he served in the palace of the Sultana. They'd be coming to destroy him. He silently prayed that he had not just been condemned to die on a countryman's sword.

\---

On the western outskirts of Bikhar, near the Seven Dunes, a black lamp lay dreaming under the blazing canopy of stars. As travelers from distant lands rode horses through the wind, the hot sand slithered from the surface of the lamp. Nobody saw; they were blinded by onrushing sheets of sand, and they could barely look an inch in front of their faces. But the black lamp gleamed, and waited. And the clamor of a mustering army echoed from the distant West; from a land that knew that maxim, beautiful and dangerous before all others: Come what may, the future does not wait.

\---

When the beacon-fires were lit for the first time around the palace of the Dragonfly Emperor, Xi Po, the market which would have gathered along the Royal Road in a more ordinary time dispersed; strange things could happen, with the Empire tilting towards a war footing. But one lonely fortune-teller, listening at the window of the Lotus Blossom Garden, would swear until her dying day that she had heard the Emperor consulting with an Oracle about a war - about the fate of the Eternal Empire if it was drawn into a conflict on a scale not seen since the Suppression of the Barbarians, in the days of his grandmother's reign. As the fortune-teller would later recount the tale, the Oracle's judgement was an uncertain one, more like a riddle than an answer. But to the end of her life, not one person, when she told this story, could guess the answer to the riddle. And neither could she.

But then again, her telling may have been colored by hindsight. What all could say for certain was that the fires were lit that night, and the market cleared; that in the court of the Dragonfly Emperor, grave matters were discussed; and that in the Pits of Terror, just outside the palace walls, screams were heard that night, screams as had not been heard from the prisoners of a Dragonfly Emperor in more than a hundred years.


	3. Chapter 3

Jamal Bashir waited in the Pit of Terror. It was dark, and the night air was cool even in the fetis pile of trash he sat on, the refuse that was allowed to pile up here in this holding place for spies and traitors. It had been a bad couple of days. It had been a bad year, really.

Jamal Bashir had gone to the Red Lotus Kingdom, which was the Dragonfly Empire, in disguise. He was the divine Sultana's most trusted and experienced spy; he could speak the language of the Red Lotus Kingdom, and he knew how to blend in. He had shaved his head, and told people that his name was Wan Ka - an itinerant monk on his way to the imperial city, Ba Qing-Se. He had been believed.

In a brown sackcloth robe, with his shaven head bowed penitent to passerby, he had hitched a ride to Ba Qing-Se. He had offered his services to the Dragonfly Emperor - his magical services. That was the ace up Agrabah's sleeve. Baful had entrusted Jamal with a golden scarab amulet which could lead a greedy emperor to a cave of riches - or appear to. It was an offer too good to pass up, so Jamal never feared when he had the amulet with him; for he could always offer, in the extremity, to lead the Emperor to the treasure of the Cave of Wonders. That would be his greatest trick, his only real trick, in his guise as a monk of mystical abilities. But it had all gone wrong.

The scarab amulet stirred in his dirtied robe. Still here. Still in its two pieces. But it slumbered, and waited, ready to retrace its flight - but Jamal Bashir did not know where that would be. The Cave had long been lost. And while it once had offered to a clever street rat some of the mightiest magical artifacts in the known world... those days were long gone away. Today it might not even offer the illusion of gold.

What the Cave of Wonders might offer in this fallen age was a question that Wan Ka, the man who once was called Jamal Bashir, could not answer. It lay like a stone at the bottom of the Pit of Terror.

\---

Their living space was not, in fact, as itty-bitty as all that, when it came down to it. The physical lamp of course was very small; but, to his slight disappointment as an avid admirer of Lucretius, Ja'far had long ago realized that he could make himself and Sherrezade as tiny as they wanted to be, as long as they stayed within the confines of the lamp. He could conjure up huge landscapes for them to wander in: a treetop house as cozy and well-stocked as they could possibly wish, with a roaring fire and a library of all the stories he or Sherrezade could remember; a desert so vast that the far-away curving bronze walls of the lamp looked like a hazy sky.

The first time, he'd said to Sherrezade "You ain't never had a friend like me," in perfect deadpan, and they'd both broken out into hysterical laughter, with aftershocks of fits of giggles well into the night. She had curled up behind him in bed that night, in a treetop bungalow under a canvas of stars, and then giggled into his shoulder. When her hot breath played across his skin, this peal of laughter from the woman he thought he'd never see again, he felt as happy as he had ever been in his entire life.

But life inside the lamp is long. The first tragedy - their first real tragedy, not just a blooper, not something genie magic could ever fix - was when he realized that they couldn't have children. Not inside the lamp.

They had one child, out there in the world - poor little Jasmine. Over the years, he and Sherrezade could only guess at what had happened to their daughter. They would talk about her sometimes, imagining what she must be like as Sultan. It was nice to imagine that she was ruling over an eternal golden age, but there was no way to be certain. Some nights, Ja'far would wake up in a cold sweat after dreaming that his daughter had been beheaded by barbarians, her head paraded on a pike around the golden city. Those were the nights that he would pound his fists on the metal walls of the lamp. He would grow to enormous size and strain against its lid, or try to peer out through its neck. But the neck bent, and the metal sides were dark, so even daylight barely filtered through. The world outside was forever hidden from them, until some lucky fool found the lamp again and thought to polish its side.

Then he would escape.

And Sherrezade- Sherrezade who shared his laughter; who stayed up late so many nights toying with the chess board, but always came back to him eventually; Sherrezade who still whispered stories in his ear at night - but always the same stories, always the ones he already knew; Sherrezade who beamed with love from those eyes he had missed for so long, those big, empty eyes-

He knew. Of course he knew. On some level, he had always known the rules - the provisos and the quids pro quo that his genie had first spelled out, that now rolled around with absolute precision in his deep unconscious, part of the inherited lore of the Djinn. He remembered that funny genie, putting on a ghoulish voice and strands of mummy wrapping to make himself look like a reanimated corpse as he explained:

"I can't bring anyone back from the dead. Believe me, it's not a pretty picture."

But he curled up with her at night. With Sherrezade. His daughter, his beautiful, kind-hearted daughter, had wished him every happiness, and this was the best that his powers as a djinn could do. He hadn't peered into the new cthonic depths of his brain, however much he was sometimes tempted. He knew that he would find there something he could not unsee. Something... not a pretty picture.

Some things are better left lying in the ground. He knew that. So he let the secrets of the lamp stay buried, and he played chess against his bride, long into the firelit night. And they made love. He tried to smile, and laugh. He tried not to be sick.

There was nobody else. No matter what vastnesses he conjured, and no matter how far they trekked - even when they stayed apart, they shared an itty-bitty, teeny-tiny living space. Ja'far knew, deep in his heart, that he was all alone.

\---

The torturer's face peered down into the Pit of Terror that morning, as the first rays of light broke over Ba Qing-Se; below him, the penitent monk Wan Ka, whose true name was Jamal Bashir.

"Tell me who your true master is, and we will set you free," the torturer said. Wan Ka was silent, his shaven head bowed.

Finally, he spoke, in a quiet voice. "I am a custodian of rites. I have no master but the Emperor."

"You bear no true service to the Dragonfly Emperor, you worm. You call yourself a sorcerer, you name yourself a custodian of rites. But you conduct no rites, and you carry no sorcery."

The man who called himself Wan Ka was silent once again. Half-buried in the stinking mud, he calculated. There was a way to escape this trap. There had to be.

Above him, the torturer was boiling water. He knew that he would have to do something - or all would be lost.

**Author's Note:**

> (The worldbuilding in this story may be so slapdash as to border on offensive, but it can hardly be worse than either layer of source material, so I make no apology.)


End file.
